Twitter Comes Alive on Bestowing of Prize

Twitter Comes Alive on Bestowing of Prize

Article excerpt

In response to the news, Europeans struggling with austerity
showed that they could still loosen their belts to enjoy a belly
laugh - or to vent their spleen.

Eight million Norwegian kroner, the cash award for winning the
Nobel Peace Prize, will not remedy the European Union's financial
woes. But if humor is fungible, the Nobel committee got its money's
worth in awarding the 2012 prize to the Union.

Europeans may be struggling with the constraints of austerity,
but in response to the news on Friday, they showed that they could
still loosen their belts for a belly laugh -- or to vent their
spleen. Some voices even praised the decision.

In its scope, at least, the Nobel committee's move to award the
prize to 500 million people was perfectly in tune with the spirit of
an era in which anyone can take to Twitter to provide an instant,
informal referendum.

Wags of all political stripes took their cue from Henry
Kissinger, who once wondered whose telephone number to dial if he
wanted to "call Europe." In the European Union, a political project
in which a number of officials and institutions share power with 27
national leaders, who would go to Oslo to officially pick up the
prize?

On Twitter, Charlemagne, a column in The Economist magazine,
awarded one of the three people who hold the post of "president" of
an E.U. governing institution -- Martin Schulz, at the European
Parliament -- the "prize among 'presidents' for the fastest
acceptance tweet." Mr. Schulz had posted a message on Twitter:
"Deeply touched honoured that the #EU has won the #Nobel Peace
Prize. Reconciliation is what the EU is about. It can serve as
inspiration."

In euro-skeptic Britain, which is in the European Union but not
in the euro zone, the news was met with derision.

Benedict Brogan, deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph in London,
wrote: "I suppose it could have been even sillier: They could have
awarded E.U. the Nobel for economics."

This joke, and variations on the theme, quickly made the rounds.
Some applied a similar formula to the Union's difficulty in
surmounting disagreements between rich and cash-strapped member
states. …